I live near a huge windfarm, but my electric company doesn’t offer wind power.
How is that windfarm plugged into the grid? Is the electricity market just shares and not about the actual electricity produced and I’m technically using the wind power? Or does the windfarm physically “plug in” somewhere very distant to me? Since the wind is pretty continuously producing electricity will I never be picked to be in a rolling blackout? How do you even have those energy saving planned partial grid blackouts when there’s windpower?
I feel like this post really embodies how a five yr old would ask questions. Any response to any piece of my questions is welcomed! Thank you
In: Technology
A national electric grid is basically like one massive lake: Power stations pour water into the lake, and users take water out of the lake, and the level of the lake must never change
Power utilities will make a contract with you that says “you can take water from the lake and pay us x$ per liter”. Since a lake is self levelling it doesn’t actually matter if the utilities input pumps are on the other end of the lake to where you are taking water out, as long as they pump the same amount of water back into the lake that you take out, the water level doesn’t change.
And of course there’s a bunch of other power utilities and power users who all have their own input and output pumps.
So any power you are using **is** in fact a mix of all power sources on the grid at the time, the fact that your utility doesn’t offer wind power just means that none of that specific utility companies “input pumps” are wind power, but *other* utility companies **do** have “input pumps” that are wind power, you simply share in the power that they pump into the grid, just like everyone else shares the non-wind power that your utility puts in.
Paying your utility for a specific type of power doesn’t mean that you only get that type, it just means the company promises that it will use that specific “input pump” to replenish the amount of power you use up.
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